[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Others have pointed out excellent reasons for migrating to a well
managed repository for the codebase. This is absolutley standard practice
and good software engineering from which we will all ultimately benefit.
The tools for dealing with this are simple to use (a joy to use compared to
what we had when I was a lad!) and as has been pointed out, support access
to the entire codebase or just the compiled and built binaries. Setting up
SVN is a one time operation: dealing with weird looking SVN URLs is not a
daily occurence.
It is the absolute standard practice for developers. Overdue and
necessary. Very glad it happened.
But, if nothing else is clear from monitoring here, it is that everyone
is not a code developer and does not want to be.
For everyone else, the nonprogrammers, some more ordinary distribution
method for the beta-binaries would be a very nice thing to have. What
we had, in fact, did not appear at all broken to me. I have had great
success with the betas and expect it to continue. I don't get the added
barriers.
Sure SVN is just "one more tool." For a coder like me, SVN is nothing
much. Haven't bothered yet, but when I want the next beta, I'll
download it and I'm sure I'll have minimum to no trouble. For someone
else, however, it can be a bit much, no matter how simple it may be once
installed. A lot of people aren't interested in "one more tool" if they
don't have to have it, especially if they aren't programmers.
Even more especially with "weird looking URLs." We're asking people,
after all, to download code and then put it on a 1500 dollar radio. If
it were me, and I wasn't a programmer, I'd definitely want the maximum
assurance I was doing what I think I was doing and not picking up a
rather more experimental level of the code than I realized. The more
programmer-esque it is to do, the less confidence I would have (and,
perhaps, the more trouble I would have admitting to it here).
And, in truth, _everyone_ already knows how to download a zip file or
even a self-unpacking .exe file. Browsers are popular for a reason --
people understand them.
And, whatever grief it was causing the development team, the original
distribution method (especially for those uninterested in coding) worked
exceedingly well for me and for (as far as I could tell) for everyone
else. Moreover, the risk is in the binary itself. The only reason to
go with the extra mumbojumbo of SVN is to simply discourage people from
using betas to start with. Why is that a good thing?
If we're going to have binaries somewhere anyhow, and if there's already
a web server lurking about to boot, would it make that much difference
to have some sort of http/download access to them, in-place? Why force
non-developers to master a tool they have no interest in and which may
actually intimidate them a bit? And, maybe cause a few extra problems
in the end?
Is this all for some homely reason like the SVN repository and the flex
web server are on different machines? Requiring everyone to use SVN or
CVS is, so far as I know, pretty unprecedented for an open source
project, especially one where most of the population aren't coders.
Almost everything I can think of in the open source world that really
matters is available as "naked" RPMs or tarballs outside of the
repository proper (including, quite often, alpha/beta level code).
Larry WO0Z
